In reply to LeeWood:
This whole thread has made my brain melt, but for what its worth, these are my category descriptors... (I need to write these down just for myself after the variations upon variations mentioned here!) They are not right or wrong, but personal judgements (feel free to pick them apart, I dont really care)
Onsight - Climb a route with no prior knowledge (except a guidebook description. Go on then, I know someone wants to argue this point!), get to the top first go with no falls or resting on gear. I will claim an onsight for a sport route if I put the draws in on the lead, or if the draws have been placed by somebody else.
Ground up - Fall off a route on the onsight attempt. Lower to the ground, pull the ropes, but leave gear. Climb the route on a subsequent attempt, with no falls or resting on gear.
Beta flash - Climb a route ground to top, with no falls or rests, but knowing information about the route, specifically anything to do with crucial gear placements, crux location etc. OR, if I fell off whilst attempting an onsight, stripped my gear and came back another day to do it first go. If on this second day i still fell off, I would attempt to ground up it again.
Headpoint - Abseil a route and check gear placements or rock quality, or fixed gear etc. But DONT do any moves on the top rope. This could technically be used on trad or sport, but I would always just go bolt to bolt on a sport route, and redpoint it. I dont tend to focus on onsighting with single pitch sport routes.
Redpoint - For a trad route, abseil line, climb line on top rope, work out gear placements, basically anything I can do to make the route as safe as I want it to be (plenty of arguments to be had here too, go for it...). For a sport route, basically anytime I do the route with no falls, having gone bolt to bolt, or fallen on an onsight or whatever. If I fall on a sport route onsight, I will usually just finish it by going bolt to bolt, and try and climb it clean after that, thus skipping the ground up stage and going straight to redpoint.
Dogging - Fall off on an onsight, but finish the route without lowering down. Some will see this as a valid ascent, thats fine. But I dont. N.B, this also counts if I weight the gear whilst resting. I consider both of these to be dogging. If i were to do either of these and then climb the route clean, it would be a redpoint, regardless of the initial intention. The opportunity for a ground up has been lost once youve pulled back onto the rock.
There are others which I dont really use:
Yoyo ing - Fall off on an onsight, lower down but dont pull the ropes. Then climb it on a subsequent attempt. (I will always go for a ground up attempt in this case). Again some people would claim this is an ascent, personal preference I guess and again the opportunity for a ground up has been lost once youve pulled back onto the rock.
If i fall off on a multipitch/big wall then in theory i would still claim a ground up or redpoint if I lowered back to the last belay, pulled the ropes etc, but depending on time/weather I would just yoyo it, or dog it, or french free it. But I would claim the style for the whole route as the 'worst' pitch. I.e if i onsight every pitch except one, where I fell off and then carried on climbing, it would be dogged. However my multipitch ethics tend to be less strict, and would still tell somebody that I made an ascent of 'route x' even if i dogged a pitch or two. I would just be honest about what I did and if you dont accept it, then good for you.
Done.